How to reconcile two solid US studies that bring together qualitative and quantitative evidence in the attempt to illuminate perceptions and subjective experiences of well-being?

Towards the end of 2009, the Anglo American team of Andrew Oswald and Stephen Wu published findings in the journal Science that suggested that how people said they felt about their lives – how satisfied they were – approximated to a quantifiable environmental measures of such things as sunshine hours, congestion and air quality in their home state.

The match was close enough, Oswald concluded, to encourage social and economic policy makers to think they could rely on life-satisfaction survey data. [See:California? Unhappy? Ho-ho-ho!]

Published almost simultaneously in a journal representing the activity of child well-being data analysts, were findings from a series of polls designed to establish how well the US public understands the circumstances, characteristics and living conditions of American children.

Again there was a reckoning between qualitative and quantitative data, in this case comparing public understanding of child demographics and well-being with the picture painted by official statistics.

The central finding was that the perceptions of two-thirds of the general population were inaccurate. They tended to think they were worse off than the statistics indicated, and they were generally unaware of any current, positive trends.

In “Accentuating the Negative”, Child Trends researcher Lina Guzman and her colleagues line up five possible reasons for the mismatch:

• a tendency to reflecting knowledge of how things once were
• media preoccupation with comparisons between decennial censuses and their neglect of of evidence of interim change
• media interest with individual tragedies
• poor statistical literacy, for example an inability to distinguish between levels and trends
• the influence of personal experience – for example the lack of undertstaning of urban ethnic diversity on the part of rural populations.

Whatever the reason, the implications are troubling to Child Trends not only because they confirm the results of other studies of negative perception, but also because if public perceptions affect the dynamics of policy making – as they surely do – then policy will be skewed by skewed perceptions.

One version of that argument would be that broadly negative perceptions are likely to draw political energy away from strategies for improving well-being toward preventing negative behaviors, or that the public might be less ready to support interventions because they overestimate the likely cost.

Alternatively, they reason, widespread public belief that large segments of the child population are in difficulty might help to galvanize support for public policy aimed at children.

The researchers also point to findings elsewhere that extreme views may be more closely related to support for policy and practice. They cite indirect evidence that something of the sort has occurred in relation to child poverty, health insurance, and childhood obesity.

They say more research is needed on the link between public perception and public support for policy. Were it to emerge that perceptions about child well-being were consistently wrong and consistently exerting a negative impact on support for policies, then there would be grounds for more concerted efforts to promote public awareness.

Despite acknowledged flaws, mostly to do with the limitations of polls as sources of evidence. and the unreliability associated with low response rates, the researchers argue that their work provides a more comprehensive portrait of US public awareness of children and, unlike previous studies, makes the comparison between public perception and official statistics. (But so did the work by Oswald and Wu!).

See: Guzman L, Lippman L, Moore K A and O’Hare W, “Accentuating the Negative: The Mismatch Between Public Perception of Child Well-being and Official Statistics” Child Indicators Research 2, 4, pp 391-416.